Goodnight, but not goodbye -

For a long time this blog was the only way for me to get the liner note copy out on the interwebs... but then I updated my website. The liner notes are now fully discoverable alongside the poems there, so posting them here makes for a lot of redundant work.

I'll still post notices of future release parties and events here, but otherwise... so long, blogspot. You served well while I needed you -

JT

Edition 9 is on the way~

Edition 9 Arrives

on Friday, October 9
at the Tavern of Fine Arts
313 Belt Ave, StL 63112


Reading starts at 7pm

Jennifer Goldring  |  Sara Ross  |  & Ryan Krull

will read from Edition 9, past Architrave editions as well as some of their all-time-favs.

"Of Course, Loss" by Tom Montag

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Tom Montag is a middlewestern poet and essayist interested in the relationship between people and place. His poetry includes In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013, The Big Book of Ben Zen, and Middle Ground. His prose includes Curlew: Home, a memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm, and The Idea of the Local, essays exploring the relationship of people and place. Montag serves as managing editor of the Niedecker Monograph Series, What Region?. He has been editor and publisher of a variety of small presses. He and his wife created The Wisconsin Poets Calendar in 1982. He was named a Founding Contributing Editor of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses in 1976. His work is anthologized in The Long Journey Home: The Literature of Wisconsin through Four Centuries, edited by Jim Stephens. He has been married to Mary, his partner in everything, since 1969.

the Poem: 

For two full stanzas the poet composes a laundry list of disappointments catalogued in general enough terms for readers to insert their own distressing particulars. The poet is aware he might lose his reader, though, so he uses rhythm and sound (e.g., the repeated l’s in loss, lesson, leaves; the regular stresses of “STAND and comPLAIN,/ if you WISH—it DOES no GOOD”) to pull us through. And it’s a good thing, because the poem’s turn in the last stanza is toward the hope that we can, after all, understand something of each other. The poem’s “small pulse of…hope” is for our common humanity, a surprising end to a poem that, at least at first, holds tight to loss.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Goudy Old Style italic 

Epigraph: 12pt Goudy Old Style italic 

Body: 12pt Luminari

This poem reads like an old lesson, rediscovered; Luminari resembles the careful penmanship of a monk whose life’s work was to copy text worth teaching. To keep the page from looking too antique, the remaining text needed a typeface that had a similarly regular curve but with a more contemporary feel. Goudy Old Style has slightly upturned serifs similar to Luminari’s but a more open letterform that balances the dense look of the poem’s body.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Crossing the Red Sea" by Edward Dougherty

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Edward A. Dougherty is the author of 5 chapbooks, the latest of which is Backyard Passages (FootHills Publishing), as well as of the books Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree (WordTech) and Part Darkness, Part Breath (Plain View Press). After finishing his MFA in Creative Writing in Bowling Green, Ohio, Dougherty was poetry editor of the Mid-American Review. Then he and his spouse traveled to Hiroshima to be volunteer directors of the World Friendship Center where they served for two and a half years, witnessing the fiftieth anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They now live and work in Corning, New York.

the Poem: 

The Red Sea. An angel. This poem begins telling a familiar Old Testament story and then swerves into unexpected territory: “Are they escaping/ or are they illegal?” In an instant the poet has expanded the scene to include a second, similar landscape (the Rio Grande and surrounding desert) through which another group of refugees makes its way toward something “Beyond sight, beyond knowing.” It’s really just that word “illegal”—a very specific term in twenty-first century America—that creates the parallel to Mexican immigrants and the poem’s surprise. A comparison of the two Exoduses reveals us to ourselves—the true work of poetry—by pointing out how much a reviled, contemporary group has in common with a revered people from antiquity. We call what the Israelites did “escape” so that the illegal nature of their actions can be overlooked. Why then can’t we see the very human desire to escape in people we prefer to label “illegal”?

the Design: 

Title: 30pt Baskerville roman and small caps, bold 

Name: 24pt Baskerville roman 

Body: 12pt Baskerville roman, italic, small caps, and all caps

Like the blanching angel, we who read this poem are witnesses, so the design needed to mimic the scene. White space where the water has formed the sides of a valley, text staggered across and along the page where the seabed is exposed, as if the letters were written by feet slogging through the mud. The choice of Baskerville was as much for the exuberant flourishes in the italic as for the variety of available styles. Small caps and italics draw attention to the repeating elements of the poem, stressing the urgency of this risky, collective action.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Unquiet" by Heather Lang

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Heather Lang is the online managing editor for The Literary Review, co-editor of Petite Hound Press, and an adjunct professor. She is a recent graduate from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program, and her chapbook manuscript, Common Prayers, was named a semifinalist in the 2014 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award competition. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published by or is forthcoming in december, Jelly Bucket, Mead, Watershed Review, and others, and she has reviewed for Atticus Review and HTMLGIANT, among others.

the Poem: 

Look at how the lines break around the subject of this poem and how the couplets illuminate the nature of this couple’s difficult year. “to survive./ Where is the space” functions as its own question, separate from the rest of the thought. The two lines that follow work in the same, separate way. These fragments of the poem’s central question are also fragments of the existential crisis embedded in the poem, where we can feel the hurt before we even know “It’s been a year/ since we lost her.” Lang then takes it one step further, breaking individual words across the ends of lines to underscore the broken state of her subjects. It’s especially effective in the closing lines where wings and flight are separated from the life of actual birds.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 18pt Radical Block 

Body: 12pt Optima

The emptiness that surrounds the two people in this poem is so heavy. The typeface had to reflect that weight as well as its effect. Radical Block hems in its letterforms with solid ink, making the title look as much like a slash as a word. For the body, though, greater legibility was needed. Optima’s strong vertical strokes hold their own against Radical Block and yet also feel delicate, like a bird’s wing. 

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"When All Else Failed" by Jennifer Goldring

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Jennifer Goldring, originally from Arizona, is a writer and photographer based in St. Louis. She holds a BA Degree in economics. Despite her training she has given up on solving the world’s economic problems and now writes poetry, which she finds to be a much more meaningful endeavor. Her poetry can be found in Tar River Poetry, and her photography can be found at Juniper Tree Studio.

the Poem: 

The images in this poem are all grounded in the familiar wish to fly away to a simpler life, to assume an animal form where (we imagine) finding food would be our only concern. But the poet also uses her images to explore what lies beneath those wishes: not so much a need for escape or simplicity as the desire for agency and connection in a world “slippery with life and slippery/ with death.” The speaker swoops and dips, pins and rips, pecks and screeches, all of it self-directed, visceral, requiring a body. When at the last her raptor leaps back into the air, it’s a communion with the wind that carries her. She is renewed.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 42pt Echelon 

Body: 12pt Optimus Princeps

Taking on a new form means leaving an old one behind. The words of the title especially read like the start of an epitaph, something written in stone to commemorate a person’s passage from one form to another. The typeface for the body needed to have a solid, block-like presence on the page and the kind of strong vertical stroke that survives weathering. Optimus Princeps is only available in small capitals, each letterform its own block, stacked and joined like precision-hewed stone. Echelon has more variance between thick and thin strokes, more curvature, but conveys a similar strength.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Turning the Corner" by Polly Brown

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Polly Brown lives on a hillside in central Massachusetts, writes a blog about progressive education at ayeartothinkitover.com and has two poetry chapbooks in print: Blue Heron Stone (Every Other Thursday Press), and Each Thing Torn From Any of Us (Finishing Line). Recent poems have appeared, or will soon, in Clade Song, Sandy River Review, Soundings East, and Turtle Island Quarterly. Meanwhile, a manuscript called What There Is, which moves from geology to botany to zoology to human artifacts, will soon go scouting for publishers yet again.

the Poem: 

The line “together, the leaves have staggered” is really the crux of it: the action of individual leafs, taken together, signal momentous change. The poet then gives the tree the very human ability to “[make]/ its corner of the yard an image/ of itself.” Eventually there comes a point when (if we’re lucky) “the body/… has thinned” into old age. But that’s when Brown uses her images to throw a curve: that thin body, those staggering leaves have all given way not to cold or darkness but to a clear blue sky. It’s a transcendent moment that finds the beauty hidden in “let[ting] go.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt Century Schoolbook bold 

Body: 14pt Bodoni italic

As the tree’s canopy has thinned, so has the body of the poem: there’s an extra space between each word, and the text as a whole has been kerned open to let the white page really show through. Bodoni’s italic rolls evenly, like a few remaining leaves in the wind. Century Schoolbook is firm and upright, especially in boldface, providing what will stay through the winter: the trunk and the ground.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"I Have Half a Mind" by April Salzano

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

April Salzano is currently working on a memoir on raising a child with autism and several collections of poetry. Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow, and Rattle. Her first chapbook, The Girl of My Dreams, is forthcoming in spring 2015 from Dancing Girl Press. The author serves as co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press.

the Poem: 

There is so much distance packed into this short poem. The speaker is a wife and (presumably) mother but she describes her children as if they were strange wildlife. She uses the word “husband” but insists it’s just a name. And who among us hasn’t had that disorienting “how did I get HERE?!” moment or wondered if it might be best to scrap everything and start over? The poet moves deftly through the rhythm of these moments: how our estrangement from ourselves first shows in our estrangement from those we love; how we feel out of sync with the rhythms of life (“Does anyone iron anymore?”) when in fact we’ve lost sight of what makes life worth living (I had no intention of laughing/ so little”). Closure in moments of unhappiness and indecision seems like it will never come. In this poem, it never does.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Garamond bold 

Body: 14pt Garamond roman

The speaker has only just begun to organize her thoughts, so the design is arranged loosely to convey a similar series of shrugs and turns, first this way, then that, spiraling on itself. While this circular pattern suggests a hurricane, an actual storm possesses a clearly defined eye at its center. The speaker here has no such clarity, so the form needed to remain a little scattered. The typeface for such an unusual shape had to be extremely regular and legible—the last line is almost upside down—and Garamond fit the bill perfectly.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Called to the Water" by Moriah Cohen

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Moriah Cohen’s poetry has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hoot: A Mini Literary Magazine on a Postcard, Baltimore Review, and Narrative. She lives in New Jersey with her two sons.

the Poem: 

Paddling away into the sunset seems like a simple teenage escape fantasy, but no matter how fast the current or how wide the body of water, there is no erasing the horizon. Not unless the current pulls you under. Is suicide what “should have happened” instead of survival? Does she wish she’d succeeded? That’s one possible reading. The other: Persephone under the sway of pomegranate seeds, called across the river to the underworld, the summer grass already growing stale in anticipation of her departure. Either way our speaker is weary with experience and what she most wishes to convey—what has remained true among the falsehoods, is the desire to escape.

the Design: 

Title: 36pt Courier bold 

Name: 24pt Courier roman 

Body: 12pt Gill Sans roman & italic

The lightness of floating down a river needed to be reflected by the body’s typeface; Gill Sans is so uniformly thin it seems to skim the page. The title is stretched out to echo the river’s pull on the girl and boldface to show the strength of that pull. Courier’s serifs provide a more rooted feel, perfect for the river’s solid bank.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Green Lake, Michigan" by Preston Craig

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Preston Craig was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has previously appeared in Glitterwolf and Wilderness House Literary Review, among others. He graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, as a classical guitar major and is currently a junior at Harvard University, where he studies English.

the Poem: 

This is intimate terrain, a map of the speaker’s memory. On it, we find the body of the beloved as if he were Green Lake itself, his neck like “the mouth of a river” that “opens out into his shoulders.” Since this is actually a poem, though, we also have what is “unwritten on maps”: the associated emotion. It’s in the cracked chair that settles unevenly, the silverfish that scatter, but most of all in that crescent of hair “rotting beneath the heavy soil.” Whatever the reason for the beloved’s departure, Green Lake is abandoned, like the speaker.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Phosphorus 

Body: 12pt Futura Condensed Medium

Futura is heavy on the page so that each stanza resembles a clipped lock of dark hair, their collective arrangement in a “black half-moon” like the hair on the ground in the third stanza. Phosphorus’s descenders have a scythe-like quality that could alternately be crescent moons; its contrast between thick and thin strokes on the bowls of the letterforms create more crescents.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Ghost Dog" by Lindsay Ahl

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Lindsay Ahl’s chapbook, The Abyssians, was a finalist for the 2013 National Poetry Chapbook Award. Her poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, RHINO, Vellum, Drunken Boat, New Delta Review, and many others. Her fiction includes a novel, Desire, out with Coffee House Press, and stories in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Fiction magazine, and others. She publishes Shadowgraph, an arts & culture journal.

the Poem: 

“You see that meadow over there?” An innocent enough question quickly takes on a life of its own. The hiker’s memory of the dog, long buried, brings a shade of her into the physical world. The dog is an echo of the question, “You see the meadow?” created as the memory of the dog and this place intertwine in both hikers’ minds. This is how memory propagates. One person’s direct experience becomes an echo in the mind of a person hearing of that experience. Both the echoing story and the original experience are real memories.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Phosphorus Oxide 

Body: 14pt Roman Antique italic

These two typefaces represent different forms of decay: Phosphorus Oxide disappears from the inside out and Roman Antique dissolves inward from the outside. Neither maintains complete spatial integrity against the white of the paper, perfect for a poem about the thin places between memory and the present moment.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Where do you get your ideas?" by Michael Bazzett

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Oxford Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest. He was the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for his first full-length collection, You Must Remember This, (Milkweed Editions, 2014).

the Poem: 

The writing process can be mysterious—sometimes even to writers—so is it any surprise to find a tall tale filling in for a satisfying answer? It’s certainly more entertaining than the truth that lurks beneath the fanciful elements of this poem: creativity isn’t passive at all. There’s no muse to hand you something beautiful and fully realized. You’ve got to get out there, dodge the bad ideas and run the good ones down. And when you find them—the truly creative ideas—you won’t be sure what to make of them at first. Only then can you be still, or try to be still in the presence of something wild, something with the means to hurt you, something that will very likely mark you with its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Euphorigenic 

Body: 14pt Phosphorus Bromide

Without a satisfying explanation of their origins, ideas become fantastical creatures, surfacing from our subconscious like the Loch Ness Monster. The typeface for this poem had to capture that unbounded outlandishness while remaining legible through increasingly intense curvature. Phosphorus Bromide does just that, and Euphorigenic provides a complimentary whimsy. After all, the teeth aren’t real, but the idea of teeth.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

Get Ready for Edition 8!

Edition 8 Gets Born

on Friday, March 20
at the Tavern of Fine Arts
313 Belt Ave, StL 63112

Reading starts at 7pm


This Edition has poems from:

Lindsay Ahl  |  Michael Bazzett 

Polly Brown  |  Moriah Cohen

Preston Craig  |  Edward Dougherty

Jennifer Goldring  |  Heather Lang

Tom Montag  |  April Salzano


The Tavern will have a jazz duo (piano/voice) later in the evening for those who'd like to linger.

"Troubleshooting Your Advanced Degree" by Michael Jones

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Michael Jones teaches at Oakland High School in Oakland, CA. His work appears in Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other places.

the Poem: 

The lexicon of the library-dwelling graduate student is perfect for this poem. It serves simultaneously as an expression of frustration and a description of the source. What’s best, though, is the title: as if graduate study is a piece of equipment like a printer, where most problems can be solved by checking cables and restarting the power. Imagine being able to do that with the archived papers of a famous writer: restart to find all the misfiled pieces back in their proper place. Or to upgrade your brain’s software when a new piece of writing refuses to take shape. Alas, some things remain stubbornly analog. 

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Perfect DOS VGA 437 by Zeh Fernando 

Body: 18pt Kubasta by Kai Kubasta

Everything old is new again, or more accurately, the humanities departments of any given university will have the most outdated technology on campus. Perfect DOS VGA and Kubasta both recreate the dot matrix printing you still might see on a bulletin board here and there. Who knows? Maybe the printers have been upgraded, but this notice, still true, hangs on.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"After After Sappho" by Maggie Colvett

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Maggie Colvett is an M.A. candidate at the University of Georgia. She served as 2014 editor of The Mockingbird, the arts and literature magazine of East Tennessee State University. A collection of her poems entitled The World by Memory and Conjecture was awarded ETSU’s Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize in the Humanities for outstanding work in any area of the humanities. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cumberland River Review, and Still: The Journal. She lives in Athens, GA and Piney Flats, TN, where her family keeps many dozens of chickens.

the Poem: 

“All bicycles/ are your bicycle.” Isn’t that the essence of falling in love? Before, bicycles didn’t even register. Afterward, they are everywhere. And it’s that division, that mark in time that Maggie Colvett understands so well. All other events of life are re-ordered in relation to this one, seminal event and the everyday objects associated with it take on new significance. That’s true of encountering new ideas and writers, too. Images and turns of phrase take up residence in our minds and leave us “swirling in [their] wake.” It needn’t even be a whole poem. It could be a snippet of something from antiquity, something by Sappho, say, that renders all else capital A “After After.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 30pt Bordeaux Roman Bold

Body: 14pt Optima 

Sappho is ancient and mysterious – we have just fragments of her work – but she’s also very much alive because her concerns remain current. The typeface for the body of a poem that invokes her therefore had to be timeless but also a little mysterious. Optima provides a clean, modern silhouette but is it seriffed or sans? That depends on whom you ask. Bordeaux Roman provides a flourish to the ragged edge of a layout patterned after ripped notebook paper. The pair of lower case g’s in the poet’s name could be the wheels of a bicycle; those striking capital a’s could be the bicycle’s rider, spine leaning slightly forward on her long arms.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"she tames the small things that consume us" by Dan Sicoli

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Dan Sicoli, of Niagara Falls, NY, writes about hope and the fallout that comes from offering it up. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks from Pudding House Publications (Columbus, Ohio), Pagan Supper and the allegories. In addition to co-founding and co-editing the literary press and magazine Slipstream (www.slipstreampress.org), his work has appeared in numerous litmags, e-zines, anthologies, and poetry audio recordings including Chiron Review, ONTHEBUS, Quercus Review, Bop Dead City, Barbaric Yawp, Dog River Review, Bathtub Gin, 2River, Rock Salt Plum, Stirring, Up the Staircase, and Nerve Cowboy. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, he can be found in local dives, saloons and barrelhouses banging on an old Gibson 335 as a rhythm guitarist with an area rock’n’roll band. In late summers, he oven dries home-grown plum tomatoes.

the Poem: 

Enchantment is still possible in the modern world. What else can explain this woman’s gift? How else to describe this poem’s effect? Not just on the bees and the speaker, but on the reader, too. Is it the idea of being tamed? That it might be possible for another person to calm the wild, buzzing chaos of our inner and outer lives? What a good feeling it is to be fed, to sit in a field knowing the bees won’t sting, to let someone else sort out the details that would consume our time and energy. As long as “no one has her measurement” she’ll stay a source of wonder.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 16pt Didot bold 

Body: 11pt American Typewriter

Bees are rounded creatures with curvaceous flight patterns. Their wings make little clouds around their bodies… so the typeface also needed to be rounded, but with the flourish of a serif to suggest the tendrils of plants the bees service. Didot fits the bill perfectly, as does American Typewriter, chosen for its throwback to a less electronic time. The nuts and bolts of beekeeping haven’t changed all that much – and you still have to develop a knack for it as you would an old typewriter with a sticky key or two.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Last Year Without" by Haley VanJeukelom

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Haley Van Heukelom is a recent graduate of the University of Northern Colorado. She is the 2013 winner of the Rosenberry Prize, UNC’s award for exceptional student writing. She also won first prize for creative non-fiction in Northern Colorado’s student literary awards. She has published several poems in publications including: Gravel magazine, Isthmus, Lingerpost, and the Four Ties Lit. Review. Haley currently lives and writes in Bend, Oregon.

the Poem: 

We tell ourselves “the possibilities are endless” so that we can cling to what we desire. Our hearts cry “tell me… tell me” we can dance on the roof in the moonlight. Tell me we’ll laugh and wake up happy together. Hope – for companionship, for love – lingers, creating an imagined landscape that can change as quickly as the words “I walked out the minute I knew.” What the poet understands and what makes this poem more than just a series of wishes: our hearts don’t let go of those possibilities so easily. We exchange one imagined landscape for another where the same people play new roles, in this case of longing and loss. In our hurt, we cannot conceive of a world without the beloved so we let the idea of them linger “that whole year.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt & 18pt Bodoni 

Body: 12pt Bodoni roman & italic

The lines borrowed from poet Richard Siken inspired the choice of Bodoni, the eponymous typeface of typographer Giambattista Bodoni whose advice on design guides much of what happens on Architrave’s pages. Beyond homage, Bodoni’s high contrast between thick and thin strokes echoes the way the poem addresses presence and absence. The title has been kerned to feel open, almost empty like a living room with only people and no couches.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Eternal Flame" by Bruce McRae

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 800 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on YouTube.

the Poem: 

Every allusion used here is a cliché (the cigar, the Bluestockings, tunnels, etc.) and yet we still smile, happy to be ‘in on it’. It’s as if the poet has just nudged us while delivering an exaggerated wink. And while we might cringe to actually be so nudged, and as much as we might hate to admit it, in truth sex is everywhere in our daily public lives. We don’t talk about it as much as we should, even though “bells are going off all over town.” Or more precisely, we talk about it but don’t really change. We’ve only just entered “the FIRST of the long dark tunnels.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt Noir-et-Blanc bold 

Body: 14pt Champagne & Limousines bold

The typefaces needed to be a bridge between the Victorian and the modern, something sans serif but still with a self-conscious curve. Champagne & Limousines provides the curves, the o’s and a’s and even the bowls of the lower case g’s all resemble the mouth of the long dark tunnel at the poem’s end. Noir-et-Blanc curves, too, but with a little excess of ornament on the capitals. The kind of flourish a Bluestocking might pencil onto the world-renowned psycho-analyst’s name in her program.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Angel Bones" by Michael Hallock

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Michael Hallock is a poet and songwriter living in Pittsburgh. “I’m from the magnolia south,” he says, “as you may surmise from ‘Angel Bones’ – but I’m equally at home up north. New flowers to grow and there’s some undeniable connection between snow and contemplation.” Hallock has several folk-rock CDs to his credit, the latest being “Up A Winding Stair” with his band High On Loretta. “Songwriting has wonderful virtues,” he says, “but poetry offers no hiding place, entirely focuses the mind and spirit. It’s harder and scarier. I can’t say why but I relish that challenge. I love the freedom of modern poetry, though I think I use it in an old way – to tell stories – or at least to suggest them, rather than going for strange arrangements of words for their own sake.” Hallock’s poetry has also appeared recently in The Tower Journal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and is forthcoming in Angle Poetry.

the Poem: 

That dragon at the end of this poem is many things: the mother herself, indomitable, insisting on beauty even in an “unworthy” hotel; the disease that will kill her; and her son’s emotions which leave him barely able to count the beats of the waltz. What’s most dragon-like about this lady, though, is her complete lack of fear. Hallock’s portrait takes pains to show just how close to death, how “full of dust” she is but still, she insists she will be transformed. Here is the parent who rages against the dying of the light, who gives her disease no sway even as it consumes her. It’s tempting to think that such a death would be easier for the survivors to process and yet it doesn’t lessen her son’s struggle at all. Even as the dragon “folds itself into feathers” it keeps its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 18pt Gill Sans semi-bold italic 

Body: 12pt Gill Sans light

This is a heavy poem full light imagery. The typefaces therefore had to convey how a person can be both present in the world but also leaving it. They also must be able to hold deep emotion without contributing any of their own. Gill Sans’ thin, even strokes leave most of the page white, a light footprint. The title and poet’s name are the anchors, a thicker version of the same typeface.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Watermill Elegy" by Moriah Cohen

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Moriah Cohen’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, Word Riot, and Narrative where she was runner-up in this year’s “30 Below” contest. She received her MFA from Rutgers University – Newark and currently teaches at Ramapo College.

the Poem: 

This poem is so tender. Those noisy kids down by the water don’t get told to keep quiet. Neither does the speaker’s younger self get a talking to about his or her behavior. Instead s/he lingers in the spell cast by those glowing cigarettes, remembering a similar night and its loss. It would be easy to stay in that moment, to make what’s elegized mere virginity, but Cohen doesn’t aim her mourning at “what [your hands] could never give back.” Instead her speaker focuses on the youthful ease that allows a person to casually do momentous things and then just as casually fall asleep. It’s the unencumbered mind that’s mourned here, an innocence more subtle than any physical experience.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Desdemona 

Body: 12pt Didot italic

What’s missing in this poem is most important, so the typeface for the title needed to signal as much. Desdemona’s curves make a beautiful outline of both presence and absence. They also compliment the curves of Didot italic, which manage to be both sweeping (the lower case f’s especially) and regular, like waves in the water downstream from a water mill.

online ISSN: 2651-3801